How to run a demo / POC

Be prepared: Research the company, attendees, and notes from prior conversations to tailor the demo to the company/individual’s specific needs. This is too often overlooked - respect your prospect’s time and keep it to the point.

Show what matters: Avoid covering every feature, bell, and whistle of your product, however tempting it might be to show off your baby! The product features need to earn the right to be surfaced in the demo based on relevance and resonance with your audience.

Match their Role: Tailor the demo to the role your audience will play in the interfacing with your product. If your audience is made of end users and data scientists who want to go deep on the reporting, methodology, etc - go for it. BUT if you’re speaking to C-Suite or folks who are not end users of the product, keep that in mind and keep it more high level. Focus more on weaving in a narrative on how the team will be leveraging your product to drive insights and make more informed data-driven decisions that will impact business objectives/outcomes / key metrics / etc.

Speak their Language: Meet your audience where they are in terms of technical proficiency - if you’re talking to someone who is not familiar with Bayesian modeling - have a plan in place to walk them through the 101 - avoid getting in the weeds if not needed.

Set the Agenda: Send a pre-wire email before the meeting to highlight the run of show (i.e. proposed agenda on demo - here’s what I plan to cover, here’s where I think it will resonate most based on past convos, here’s where we can spend the majority of our time, etc.) Make suer you solicit feedback from attendees on what makes the most sense to spend time on.

Be Demo Ready: Make sure your demo tabs are all cached and ready to go in the right order. If you’re concerned about loading speeds, ensure you cache the image so there is no interruption in visuals as you navigate through screens.

Prepare for outages: Have a plan in the event wifi cuts out or you can’t get connected (in person). Be ready to walk through a deck with product screenshots. Yes, this can happen and the last thing you want to do is white board out those visuals!

Keep it Tidy: Avoid cluttered tabs and desktop when sharing your screen - helps keep things focused and avoids distracting your audience

Avoid distractions: Silence all notifications (Slack, email, etc)

Slow is Smooth: Speak slowly, ask questions and pause to allow feedback / commentary. You might have demoed the product 1k times and know all the ins and outs of each feature, but this is the first or second time your audience is seeing what you have built. Let them take it in!

Watch the clock: If you don’t ask “do we have the full (insert time), you have already lost. Running over the allotted time can be just as harmful as rushing the demo. Keep an eye on the clock.

HAVE FUN!

Highlighting Key Features: Start by showcasing the most powerful feature of your product as it pertains to your audience and their day-to-day workflow, process, needs, pain points, etc. You may want to lead up to/ build-up to the big moments, but starting with the key feature and how that aligns your company’s strengths with the client’s most pressing issues, demonstrates a thoughtful understanding of their needs, and gets their attention early. There is the tactical added benefit of being ready for this, especially when senior stakeholders are present, to highlight the most impactful aspects first before you lose their attention.

Problem-Solution Alignment: Continually articulating the exact problem your product solves. Use phrases like, “Based on what I understand about your business…”, and “What we’ve seen in the research space for this topic” to personalize the demo and reinforce your solution’s relevance to your prospect’s specific challenges. You are creating sound bites and memories for the prospect when you reinforce these focus areas.

Speak in your prospect’s language: Use their company vocabulary when discussing your features and walking them through their workflows. E.G, if you sell a product to a “data scientist”, but your customer calls their team members, “insight architechs”, for the same role, update your language to “insight architects”.

Catalyzing Decision-Making: You want to encourage the prospect to share your product with other stakeholders or decision-makers. This could involve direct suggestions or demonstrating features that naturally lend themselves to broader discussions within their organization. More multi-threading is not always better, you want quality contacts. The directions you can go are either laterally, to other constituents that are peers to your contact, upward, to their boss, or senior colleagues, or downwards, to their direct reports. What is important is forward momentum.

Screen and Feature Orientation: Orient the prospect when transitioning to new screens or features. You can use phrases like, “What you are seeing here is…” followed by an explanation of its significance. You can also use “this feature we call (insert name), the reason we call it that is that we thought (insert snippet about the unique thing you thought would be cool to see)., This keeps the client engaged and helps them understand the value of each element of our product.

Reiterating Problem-Solution Themes: Before introducing each new feature or workflow, reiterate the problem it solves. Use phrases like, “Zooming out here for a second, the reason we built the report in this way is…” or “we heard from customers that’s what they wanted…so we built it”… to maintain focus on how your product addresses their specific needs.

Using Stories and Narratives: Work to refine your narrative to be in a story-like format. You want to make our product more relatable and memorable. And people remember stories easier than they remember facts. Narratives about how other clients have successfully used our product can be particularly effective. Encourage the client to visualize the impact of our solution in their context. “So put yourself in the product for a week, what are some things we can imagine being different from what life is like today”… “Imagine your customers for second. You spend all this time getting them to love your product, and tangentially to the problem your product solves, you have this other major headache (eg, payroll), right now they have a few options… (describe), imagine how much time that takes…. now think of it w/ our embedded product… ). It’s almost going to feel like it should have always been that way… “

Engaging with Questions: Continually ask questions to gauge the client’s engagement and understanding of what you are showing. Questions like, “Is this resonating with you?” or “How else have you thought about solving this problem?” can provide valuable feedback and foster a collaborative atmosphere.

Seeking Feedback on Exciting Features: At the end ask what about the product excited / resonated with them the most.

Telling over Showing: Just like during discovery, a few slides can be really helpful to forming memories for your prospect and keeping their attention. The same goes for the demo. Avoid just talking about what the product can do; show them! Just getting into the demo and showing key features is significantly more effective than describing things in theory.

Over-Promising with “On the Roadmap” Responses: Frequently responding with “that’s on the roadmap” to feature requests can create a perception of an underdeveloped product. It’s better to focus on the current strengths and capabilities, and if necessary, discuss how future developments might align with their needs in a realistic manner.

Avoiding “I am not sure, let me get back to you”: If you’re unsure about an answer, it’s important to acknowledge this quickly and assure the client that you will get back to them with precise information. Saying “let me get back to you on that” promptly shows honesty and a commitment to providing accurate information.

Steamrolling, or talking over the prospect: You need to create rest stops in the demo flow so the client has an opportunity to interject. A one-sided monologue will be disengaging. You want to stop and ask “what do you think about this”, and be comfortable with a moment or two of silence before you pick back up. The goal is engagement, so you can get the prospect thinking about using your product, so their input is super important to the conversation.

Jargon and Technical Language: Using too much technical jargon will likely confuse clients who might not be as technically versed. As mentioned above speak the languge of your audience. Using internal jargon or “inside baseball” as we joking call it, expects the prospect to understand complex things that only you and your team do. Imagine you are demoing your product to your Mom or Dad, or a 13 year old, how would you describe the product and the workflows to them? True intelligence, is saying things simply.

Failing to Address Potential Concerns Proactively: If you know there is going to be an “elephant in the room” issue, or outage. Don’t wait for clients to bring it up. Hit it head-on so you can control the reframing of the problem, the importance of the issue, or the plan to mitigate it.

No Customization: If your demo is meant for banks and you show a demo for farmers, it’s not going to be interesting. If your demo is for large hospitals, and you show flows for urgent care centers, that’s a miss. If your demo is for Each client is unique, make an effort to customize the demo, and the language you use, to reflect their life experience.